She had prayed for wind and it had come, the black sails of the ship that bore her to Illusaur, pregnant with its force. She stood at the ship’s stern, her gaze fixed upon the western horizon where another ship followed in their wake, tiny but growing; gaining ever so slowly, closing the distance between them. The ship that pursued her was fast, faster than she had thought possible, and now it rode the very wind that had been sent to aid her.

She watched the flicker of its white sails with a mixture of marvel and disgust. The sun was making its descent down the western sky, and before it rose again, they would be upon her.

“Mistress.” A voice like oil sounded from behind her, and the black ranger looked over her shoulder. “My birds have returned with news.”

He had stolen it from the hoard of Mithagron the Salamander, while the beast bathed in the blood of the mountain below.It was a small trinket by comparison to the great wealth that was amassed there, but one that would be immediately missed.Mithagron’s brood was all there was left of their kind in the world, the sole remnants of a once mighty species who had been driven into extinction, or worse, into the exile of the Burning Inferno with their Infernal mistress.It brought him some small sense of joy to think of their fate there, reduced to the moat-dwellers of the Infernal Keeps, while their masters warred over their desolate prison.Mithagron had escaped that fate; however, and his brood had grown strong in the deep places of the world.Luckily for Aelon, the great glutton had long ago eaten himself into his own prison, his vast bulk preventing him from leaving the tunnels of his mountain lair. Aelon would be far out of reach before the beast returned, and what he had taken was missed.

Yathban recalled The Master musing once of basilisks, when such creatures were coming out of the south, fleeing the Draecarion Revolution.He had reflected that basilisks had all the cunning and cruelty of dragons, but none of their charm.How right he had been, and now Yathban would add one more observation to that of his old Master’s, for it appeared they were equal in their greed as well...

The vast bulk of the story is finished, and revisions have begun. Its a daunting task of ruthlessly cutting huge swaths of text. The story is long, too long, and my goal is to get it down to roughly 150-170k words.